of all the shitbags of the belle epoque avant-garde, marinetti is the one i most wish was less of a shitbag. i want to believe that the ideas and principles of futurism aren't just destined to lead you to writing poems extolling the virtues of fascist military leaders or whatever

@aparrish I have this same conflict so hard with the futurists, because aside from their ideas about masculine power and brute force being the ne plus ultra of human development, I really like them! Did you see the futurist exhibition at the Whitney five-ish years ago?

@SuzanEraslan i did not see that exhibition but wish i had! i've been surprised lately by how eager people are to paper over the shitbagness of artists from that area but also how easily you can scratch the surface and see the shitbagness displayed before you in its full awfulness :( i am trying to be more conscientious about how i present artists like this to my students because it's important to learn from the past but not worth idolizing these people in any way

@aparrish One of the things they did a really good job of in that exhibition (and this is always a difficulty problem with curation, and one they often just sidestep) was putting the work in that context, and also explaining the ways in which Marinetti was a) kind of an outlier among the futurists in that particular regard, and b) had no real comprehension of the political ramifications but liked the BIG DADDY POWER element of fascism because he was a giant misogynist.

@aparrish And it would have been so easy to be forgiving of it, like, “Oh, well, no one had ever really seen fascism at the time so he wasn’t aware of all the problems with it,” and instead they explained that he wasn’t aware of SOME of the problems with it (genocide, secret police, etc.) but fully embraced it BECAUSE of the myriad other problems with it— brutal violence, authoritarianism, hard breaks with folk traditions in favor of nationalism, derision of the feminine.

I love the futurist style in painting & in speech but the actual content was almost always the glorification of some form of shitbaggery from the beginning, even in the first manifestoes. Implicit in speed-for-speed's-sake is the sacrifice of anybody who can't keep up (including the burning of museums).

@aparrish@SuzanEraslan What a good thread! I feel like the futurists are a prime example of very problematic adolescent masculinity (i.e. "boy art") that one finds in most scenes since then. I see this kind of teenage machismo especially in a lot of "hacker" identified art these days.

@aparrishDoes George Antheil fit with the futurists? His _Ballet Mechanique_ has a lot of that Whooosh! Machines! feel but without him taking the fascist turn (as far as I know, which is not very far)

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